Some people may find it repulsive that I ate so much spicy chicken this weekend that I’m now in real physical pain and can barely see. But in the underground chicken circles I move in, this is regarded as a proud moment. They call it “a fowl hangover”. Mine came as a result of attending Wing Fest – a showdown (tag line: one wing to rule them all) where buffalo wing purveyors gather to pit their blue cheese dips and hot sauces against each other.

I’m one of the thousands of Brits who in the past couple of years have grown addicted, nay, obsessed with God’s greatest gift to this planet – the chicken wing. And if my personal wing journey is anything to go by, wings are getting serious. They have, of course, been a huge part of US culture since the 60s with over a billion eaten during the Super Bowl, and now the phenomenon has really started to hit the UK. In the past year and a half, we’ve gone poultry mad with chicken-only restaurants and pop ups joining the plethora of chicken shops that already exist on every high street. Perhaps because of chicken’s relatively low price, and the fact that it’s lauded for being healthier than red meat, we’re now said to consume 2.2 million birds a day. And wings are getting more popular than ever, with countless burger joints and bars serving buffalo wings alongside their craft beer.

At £20 a ticket, London Wing Fest had queues reminiscent of those outside Apple Stores but you think people cared about the price? Did they hell, it was the best £20 they ever spent. It was the best day of my life. Fifteen of the UK’s most prolific purveyors of wings were competing for the title of Best Wild Wing and Best Buffalo Wing. The wild wing is a plain chicken wing that you dress up in the same way you would anything. You see them at KFC in their most basic form.

The buffalo wing is different. Firstly it’s rooted in US history. In 1964, Teressa and Frank Bellissimo, a couple from Buffalo NY made wings covered in a buttery, homemade red sauce at their bar because that’s all they had in the fridge, served it up with some celery and blue cheese dip and everyone went ballistic about them. This gave the world a reference point for how they’re meant to look and taste.

The buffalo rules are these: the wing needs to be a wing, not a leg, the chicken needs to be free range, the batter needs to be crunchy, the hot sauce (Franks is the go-to brand, for good reason) needs to be all over the chicken . It needs to be buttery, lemony, opaque and for the love of everything orange, not sugary, runny or sweet.

Lastly, and most importantly, you absolutely cannot mess around with the blue cheese dip. It needs to be dip – not a dressing. It needs to be thick, it needs to be cool to offset the heat of the sauce and it needs to taste BLUE.

This may sound like a very simple list of ingredients. How wrong can you go, right? Well you can go very wrong actually. Very wrong indeed.

White Men Can’t Jerk – great name – added single cream to its blue which, sadly, meant it didn’t taste of much. Earl’s did well for flavour, controversially adding celery salt, but, regrettably, it was a dressing and there wasn’t enough of it.

Getting all the components spot on in every way possible were Wingmans, a new addition to the wing pop-up scene, which clinched the title in both categories by a mile, and deservedly so. Its crunchy, golden neon orange bites of buffalo heaven had me and my cohorts misty eyed for hours.

A brief chat with one of the founding trio tells me they’re not messing about either. With a packed events calendar and the launch of their own restaurant next year - the future’s looking bright orange.